LOS ANGELES — She is an American icon with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

But it has been four decades since she had her own prime-time TV show. Can Lassie really come
home again?

A Hollywood studio hopes so. DreamWorks Animation, creator of the
Shrek and
Kung Fu Panda movies, plans to put the charismatic collie back in the public eye — along
with Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and other decades-old characters.

Lassie, who will celebrate her 75th anniversary in December, is still the world’s most famous
dog.

Introduced in a 1938
Saturday Evening Post short story and popularized in a best-selling novel, the fictional
dog became the star of the 1943 movie
Lassie Come Home, opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowall, after catching the eye of
MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. Six more films followed.

By 1954, she had her own TV series.

The CBS show
Lassie — on which the canny canine managed to save Timmy each week from a burning barn,
falling tree or runaway automobile — ran for almost 20 years before going global in syndication and
reruns.

“She’s heroic; she’s loyal; she really is man’s best friend,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of
DreamWorks Animation. “She’s the single-most-recognized pet in the world.”

Indeed, a survey conducted in the spring by the research company Penn Schoen Berland found that
Lassie has an 83 percent brand awareness among those queried in the United States. The words most
associated with her:
classic,
smart,
loyal,
brave,
hero and
heartwarming.

But familiarity doesn’t necessarily translate into ticket sales.

“People of the age they will be targeting have no idea who Lassie is,” said analyst Doug Creutz
of Cowen and Co.

Efforts to revive Lassie’s Hollywood career have had mixed results. A 1994
Lassie movie from Paramount Pictures made $10 million in U.S. theaters. An Anglo-Irish
remake of the 1943 movie, released in 2005 and starring Peter O’Toole, was critically acclaimed but
didn’t do much business at the domestic box office.

A Canadian company produced an updated Lassie TV show in the late 1990s, but the series sparked
outrage from some Lassie fans who complained that it was tampering with an American icon.

But Lassie has one advantage over other aging properties: The character is still “alive.”

The 10th-generation descendant of the original Lassie — a male collie named Pal trained by Rudd
Weatherwax — lives in the Los Angeles area and makes occasional appearances at dog shows.

DreamWorks last year paid $155 million to acquire the Classic Media library of titles — which,
along with
Lassie, includes properties such as
The Lone Ranger,
George of the Jungle and
Frosty the Snowman.

No Lassie TV series or movie is in the works just yet, but the studio is developing a multimedia
marketing plan to reintroduce the dog.